Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

1. Get the installation image you want to use. Fedora has a lot of different flavors, I think they call them “spins,” so it’s important to know the difference and choose the right one for you.

2. Install it on a VM in VirtualBox. Play around with it, figure out what all the installation steps do, don’t be afraid to break the VM.

3. Play around with the VM in fullscreen just to get a feel for it. Don’t blame the OS for performance issues, that’s probably just the resource limitations of a VM.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary to find an OS that is comfortable enough to be your daily driver.

5. Use a program like Rufus to make a bootable USB out of the installation image.

6. Run the installer like you practiced. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT HARDDRIVE, DON’T OVERWRITE YOUR WINDOWS DRIVE. Otherwise, besides MAKING EXTRA SURE ABOUT WHICH HARDDRIVE YOU INSTALL IT TO, use defaults for settings you aren’t sure about.

I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).

I cannot stress the above warning enough: formatting the drive is the one step in installation that cannot be undone. If you format your windows drive, you cannot ever recover that data anymore.

Since it’s work related hardware, I have 2 pieces of advice; you should follow one or the other:

1. Don’t. Don’t fuck around with work hardware. It should be a separate PC that you literally only ever use to get work done. Whether it’s owned by a company or you’re self-employeed, mixing your hobby/leisure/gaming/tinker/daily driver with your work computer is a baaaaaad idea. You will get something all fuzzed up, you will try to fix it by reinstalling the OS or otherwise doing disk formatting/partitioning, and you will end up corrupting windows.

2. Okay, so you decided not to heed my warning because you like gaming (or whatever) too much and can’t afford a separate desktop/tower rn. i get it, I did the same once and lived to tell the tale (i do have separate machines now, fwiw). In that case, before you install fedora, simply disconnect the Windows drive. Yank it right out and don’t reinstall it until you’ve got linux up and running just how you like it. Not just after the installation, but after the configuration. Then there’s no chance you accidentally format/corrupt your drive.

Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

If the installer gives you the option, simply install Grub on the same drive as Linux. When you select the linux drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will run grub, which will give you options, including booting into windows if you want. When you select the windows drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will use the windows bootloader (which boots straight into windows, unless you have multiple windows installations).

Openwrt is just as easy to use as any commercial solution, the one difference is that it doesn’t come pre-installed on most hardware. Find the right hardware, and installation can literally be as easy as running a single command from the command line.

If you’re trying to avoid reading documentation and messing around in settings, good luck finding a privacy-respecting commercial solution with secure defaults that’s still simpler than openwrt’s LuCI. And I mean that, good luck. Plwase share if you find something that works for you.

You should act your age

Looks like an OS native dialog, which makes me think this is the app? Have you tried doing it directly on the website instead?

Phones abaolutely do listen, but not to audio via the mic. When Apple and Google tell you they respect your privacy, they mean they don’t harvest data directly from a live feed of the mic nor camera; they still scan your files in some cases, and they harvest your browsing history, and read your text messages metadata, and check your youtube watch history, and scan your contacts, and check your location, and harvest hundreds of other litttle tiny data points that don’t seem like much but add up to a big profile of you and your behavior and psyche.

So your friend was at a pub quiz with a couple dozen other people, and his phone knew where he was and who was nearby. A statistically significant portion of the people there were not privacy conscious and googled “Lord of the Rings runtime” or something similar. All that data got harvested by Google and Apple, and processed, and then the most recent and fitting entry from some master list of customers’ sites’ articles was pushed to all their newsfeeds.

Humans don’t understand intuitively how much information is being processed through nonverbal means at any given time, and that’s the disconnect large companies exploit when they say misleading things like “noooo, your phone isn’t listening to you.”

But it’s totally not privacy invasive, because at no point along the line did a human view your data (/s)

none, and gods willing that will always be the case. Civil war isn’t just “good guys vs bad guys”—hell, it wasn’t even that the first time around, despite union propaganda trying to make it seem like their intentions were pure. War is also starvation and loss of access to clean drinking water and constant blackouts as supply chains get interrupted; it’s many people dependent on uninterrupted health care dying off because they can’t get their meds or do their testing; it’s r*pists and pedophiles and nazis and sociopaths having their way with others while society gets distracted; it’s your loved ones dying, not because they were fighting for what’s right, but because they were “acceptable losses”; it’s constant anguish that destroys lives for multiple generations as trauma gets handed down like an heirloom.

Living through a war is about the most extreme form of hate I could imagine wishing upon someone. If someone who lived through one is willing to say “it’s time,” then I’m willing to listen. Otherwise, please excuse me if I don’t.

out of curiosity, how many wars have you been caught in the middle of?